3D biblical beard prop from cardboard

Beards are curiously fashionable at the moment, and now you can make your very own!

When looking for Purim photo booth props, I found a quite reasonable beard outline. However it was adult-sized and entirely flat. So I adapted it to make it a little smaller, and then added some layers. I cut the beard out of lightweight card and attached it to a large popstick. Unfortunately, black layers on a black background did not provide a great deal of contrast, so I experimented using layers of different colours.

I decided that it wasn’t so much the colours that mattered as the depth of the layers. I had joined the three beard layers together using double sided tape near the top of the beard. This left plenty of room to insert a piece of craft foam between the layers so that the lower part protruded outwards, making a much more visually interesting (I can hardly say realistic!) beard. The picture above shows the beards with the foam between layers, but you might just have to take my word for it. The moustache overlaps the beard leaving a small mouth space. The overall impression is possibly less biblical hero and more Lorax, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

After I’d made my beard props, I thought it would be a fun activity for the kids too. Here is my beard template with all four pieces on one page. If you pre-cut the four shapes in cardboard, kids can just trace around them. I found it helps for them to see how to lay out the page so as to fit all four pieces and not waste card. The kids were happy to staple their beard pieces together in the absence of double sided tape at the activity day.